"Doesn't a larger number of listed tokens simply mean investors get more choices?"
The fallout continues from Park Hyeon-joo, chairman of Mirae Asset Group, who recently said he "considers it fraud" that domestic crypto exchanges have listed hundreds of altcoins. It is true that Korean exchanges trade a large number of tokens. Bithumb alone lists 474, or 71 more than Coinbase, the largest exchange in the United States. There is room to agree that some degree of selection and focus is needed.
But numbers alone are a poor basis for judging whether something amounts to fraud. Many of these are early-stage projects, and businesses often run aground or fade from the market after listing — yet that is also a characteristic of the crypto market. It is hard to define a listing itself as fraud simply because investors ended up with losses. With countless projects worldwide issuing tokens that trade simultaneously on multiple exchanges, access to a wide range of assets can itself be seen as a competitive strength for an exchange.
The irony is that the first move Mirae Asset made after acquiring Digital X — having criticized incumbent exchanges over the sheer number of their listings — was to scrap trading fees. Trading volume at Digital X rose sharply after the change, but much of it was concentrated in stablecoins. Some argue that the removal of fees triggered a surge in arbitrage trading that inflated volume only on the surface.
If a company criticizes incumbent exchanges for peddling coins while igniting a fee war of its own to pump up volume, one cannot help asking what makes it different. Listing more coins or eliminating fees to generate more trades is a difference in method only; both put quantity ahead of quality.
The crypto industry has long asked to be recognized as one pillar of the financial industry of the future. Yet if competition in the market remains a contest over surface metrics, it will be hard to shake the public perception that this is nothing more than coin peddling.
Mirae Asset stepped into the ring by criticizing the incumbents. Now it should set a new standard for competition — screening for quality assets, building sound liquidity and protecting investors. What makes it different is something to be proven in the market, not in words.
